“Sex, schmex,” says Deirdre McCloskey. “I was a man for 53 years. I did not go through the trouble to become a woman, go through such a radical change, merely for sexual pleasure. If it were just about having sex with men, there are a lot more convenient ways to do that than to have gone through all this.”
Bailey and Blanchard describe the transsexuals in the second group as having “autogynephilia,” a term coined by Blanchard that means being attracted to one’s own female sex organs. “Their primary sexual attraction is to themselves as straight women,” Bailey says. “It’s heterosexual attraction, but it’s turned inward toward themselves, not outward toward a partner.” Meaning they’re turned on by a vagina, but they’d prefer it to be their own.
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According to Bailey, the particulars of individual cases don’t say as much as the aggregate does about the phenomenon of men who feel so misplaced in male bodies that they have them surgically renovated. According to McCloskey, no one’s more capable of understanding the phenomenon than the person who’s been through it.
Some transsexuals have said publicly that the autogynephilia concept actually does fit them. Willow Arune, a 57-year-old Canadian woman who identified most with lesbians when she was a man, crossed over at 49 and two years later learned about Blanchard’s theory. Now an activist on transgender issues and in what she calls a partner relationship with another woman, she openly acknowledges that she’s autogynephilic. She says that reading Blanchard’s work, “I knew, this is on the right track. It explains what I was brought up to deny, and it lets me be free.” She describes herself as “not 100 percent woman and not 100 percent male. I’m neither. I’m a transsexual woman.” And she says that dovetails with Blanchard’s description of an autogynephilic transsexual as a man who has successfully internalized a female love object–the person is still a man but with a female body of his own. (Bailey notes that to the extent that autogynephilics are attracted to others, they tend to be attracted to women.)
Northwestern won’t let Bailey talk much about Kieltyka, because it’s interviewing her as part of its investigation into whether he got informed consent from his subjects and because she threatened to sue him and the university over the book. But he does say this: “Anjelica and I had a very friendly relationship, but we disagreed all along on some things, including whether she was motivated by autogynephilia.”
Kieltyka, McCloskey, and others are now trying to portray Bailey, Blanchard, and other writers, scholars, and clinicians as part of a broad conspiracy to keep potential gender crossers from making the transition. They say the Clarke Institute is peddling research that discourages clinicians from endorsing sex-reassignment surgery for autogynephilics. After the right-wing National Review published a positive essay on Bailey’s book, McCloskey says, “the religious right picked Bailey up as their own.” Lynn Conway, a transgendered retired professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, lists on her Web site many of the links she’s found between Bailey, Blanchard, and Clarke and right-wingers, religious groups, and others who might oppose the rights of transgendered people. McCloskey says, “It’s not so much Bailey’s book but his allies who are really scary.”
Transsexuals who oppose listing autogynephilia in the DSM are troubled by its proximity to pedophilia in the classifications, something that troubles Bailey too. “Autogynephilia is a paraphilia–it’s in the same class as some bad things like pedophilia,” he says. “I hasten to add that I don’t think there’s anything immoral or harmful necessarily about autogynephilia. But there are scientific reasons–it’s not arbitrary that autogynephilia and pedophilia are lumped together. There’s something similar, not in the harmfulness of them but in the fact that they are both atypical sexual orientations and they are both phenomena that are found only in males as far as we can tell.”
